I was listening to the radio yesterday, when a song by Yes came on – Owner of a Lonely Heart. Normally no biggie, but for some reason it got me thinking, is the owner of a lonely heart much better than the owner of a broken heart? Or was Alfred Lord Tennyson on the money when he said:
Having loved and lost, and fortunately loved again, my money’s with Lord Tennyson.
What say you all?
I’ve been through numerous relationships, but none to equal the love of my life. She died almost 22 years ago and I still miss her and think of her almost daily. I’ve never found what we had, although I tried to move past it and find a new life.
I agree w/ Tennyson, while it’s hard, I knew real love and I have that memory.
Two reactions to this:
Do you have a choice?
Of course it’s always better to have an experience than to hide away and not take any risks, assuming the experience doesn’t actually kill you.
Is it better to have loved and lost?
Certainly - if I had never had lost love, I wouldn’t be the jaded and suspicious individual I am today. It takes practice to develop a well-rounded lack of trust.
It’s kind of hard to compare these two, isn’t it? I mean if you have never loved, then you have never had a lost love. And if you have loved and lost, can you honestly remember how things were before you ever fell in love?
I look at it as more of a Zen koan than any kind of helpful advice on how to mend a broken heart.
and me
Gonna disagree and say it’s better to have never loved at all . . . then again, I am bad with broken hearts . . .
I don’t even know what the quote means. Does the first part mean
For my part, I’ve loved and lost, and it totally sucked. I’ve also loved and won, and that turned out much better. But really, it isn’t exactly like you’ve got much of a choice, is it? You start out just wanting to mess around with some interesting-looking naughty bits, then the glands kick in, and next thing you know, you’re in love.
“It’s better to have loved a short girl…”
I’ll assume that to have loved and lost means that you were in a relationship, but due to one of your breaking it off or s/he falling into the woodchipper at work, it didn’t work out and that never having loved at all means either that you’ve never experienced a relationship with a loved one or love itself.
I have loved and lost, and it was painful beyond belief. Over fifteen years later, I still find myself wishing I could undo or unsay things I did/said in anger. We basically spent the last few months tearing chunks out of each other’s heart. We loved each other very much, but we were very, very bad for each other.
And I’m glad it happened. If nothing else, it was a learning experience. I learned to separate all the bullshit you hear about love and relationships from movies and songs, and I was able to use what I learned to recognize real love when I found it while serving overseas. Finding Mrs. Fresh in Korea was worth all the pain in the world, and I don’t think I would have recognized her for the woman she was if it had not been for that former dysfunctional relationship. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have joined the army in the first place.
So yes, much better to have loved and lost, IMHO.
I’ve thought a lot about this lately, because I’ve become involved in a situation that is causing me a good deal of heartache right now. I’ve wondered - to what point in time would I have to go back to, exactly, and do something differently so this never would have happened - and if I could, would I? I mean, that’s the entire premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, isn’t it? Does the happiness you’ve experienced outweigh the heartbreak?
I don’t know. Ask me again next year, I guess.
IMHO, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
[Golf claps politely] Bravo!
Is is definitely better to have loved and lost.
But better than that is to have loved, lost, carefully reviewed your strategic errors, marshaled your forces, planned your counterstrike, laid a bewildering campaign of misinformation to gain the advantage of surprise, and then to storm back to win the day, like MacArthur to the Philippines.
I’ve thought a lot about this very question, and I have concluded it is only true if the person you loved once loved you back. Otherwise, you will be an owner of a lonely AND broken heart…a double jeopardy in hell.
Definitely better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I thought this when I had never loved yet; I thought it when I had loved and lost; and still think it now that I have loved and won. And if I should lose Mr. Tesseract, it will have been worth it, a million times over.
I am glad that fear of a broken heart hasn’t stopped other people from loving. It is true that loving someone means making yourself vulnerable, which can be scary, but there is nothing can compare with the heart-swelling joy of just feeling that special someone’s arms around you just when you need a hug, nor the emptiness of knowing they are no longer there to give you another one. I would always choose the joy and the (possible) emptiness over the blank loneliness.
As tesseract said, if I should ever lose my husband, it will have been worth it, a million times over.
This is a lot like asking “Is it better to live and then die, or never to have existed?” I’m sure that there are people who would prefer the latter, but they’re not people I’d want to hang out with.
IMO, believe it or not, yes. I think emotion is part of the human condition and it’s what makes us aware that we are alive. Unfortunately, some of those feelings will be unpleasant (or in some cases extremely unpleasant), they are all varying degrees of beauty in an otherwise sterile world. Myself, having been at a point where I was virtually unable to feel any emotion at all, I would rather spend the rest of my days in some varying degrees of misery than return to the bland, gray, lifeless world that had almost no emtion.
And really, when you have experienced love, there really is nothing more beautiful. The loss is only so painful because we had been in the presence of that beauty that life without it seems… ugly. But truly, having lost it, we’re really no worse than we were without it, but in the end we still have the experience of that beauty, no matter how brief it was, and it adds color to an otherwise dull existence.
I would agree that that is analogous. Even if you do not believe in an afterlife, surely even a brief existence is preferable to never having existed, even though the end result is completely indistinguishable.
Definitely better to have loved and lost. But the problem I’m dealing with is someone who HAS loved and lost, and now is too afraid to love again, to the point where he is purposely sabotaging his new relationship, and holding her at arm’s length, all because he is afraid of the pain. I’m an outsider to the situation, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around the concept of “I’d rather never love again than risk a broken heart” when there is a chance that his heart WON’T be broken again. I’ve loved, and lost, and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, rather than shut down my heart for the next 50 years.